


I'll take Shakespeare for $1600, Alex

by rpluslequalsj



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Carolyn Martens as Alex Trebek, F/F, jeopardy au, villanelle writes rpf in her head of her and eve
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:07:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24762070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rpluslequalsj/pseuds/rpluslequalsj
Summary: "The first conversation recounted in the Bible is in Genesis 3, between these two; it leads to trouble," Carolyn reads.Villanelle doesn't break eye contact even when she answers, doesn't blink. Eve wants to—something, the smirk off her face."Who are Eve and the serpent?"-In which Villanelle is the wickedly smart, breathtakingly gorgeous, and absolutely insufferable Jeopardy contestant on a hot streak, and Eve is the show producer who really, really, really wants to see her lose.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 18
Kudos: 59





	I'll take Shakespeare for $1600, Alex

**Author's Note:**

> They're only tangentially connected, but this takes place directly after chapter 1 of my other villaneve fic "excuse me, she asked for no pickles". If you end up liking this, you'll probably like that :)

Disgraced MI5-slash-MI6-question-mark agents and former assassins on the run don’t get the luxury of elaborate dinners at fancy restaurants. They do, however, get to have the occasional quiet brunch.

Before they fucked off to Seoul or to God knows where else to kill the next member of The Twelve or whatever other fucked up fuckery they were meant to get up to—because really, with a vengeful Carolyn Martens as your boss and an international all-powerful crime syndicate as your target, things had not once gone according to plan—Eve wasn’t going to leave her hometown without going to one of her old hangouts for a slice of nostalgia.

“I have a surprise for you,” she’d said to Villanelle in an attempt to rouse her from sleep. The woman in question was spread eagle and face down on the bed they’d shared the night before. Her hair, once honey blonde, was starting to become equal parts blonde and its natural brunette.

“A sexy one?” came the muffled reply.

“Even better.” That got her attention. They’d bid Eve’s mother farewell with bows and kisses to the cheek, gone as quickly as they’d come the night before. Still, it was nice. Eve hadn’t thought she’d get the chance to visit her mother again. Villanelle had been thoughtful by suggesting—well, she grabbed Eve by the wrist and dragged her along, if Eve was aiming for accuracy—they visited her home, and she had instantaneously gained her mother’s approval with her flawlessly accented, if grammatically troubled, fledgling Korean.

If Eve had overheard them talking later in the evening about things not meant for her ears when Villanelle thought Eve had gone to bed—it was 9 PM, Jesus, she wasn’t that old yet—she wasn’t going to mention it.

“That went much better than my visit to my family,” Villanelle had joked. It was a surprising sign of development, considering the last time they’d talked about that, over a year ago, had also been the first time.

Villanelle was surprisingly well-behaved in the thirty minutes it took to drive to their destination. She only asked once where they were going.

“Last stop on Eve’s Hometown Tour,” Eve said when they arrived, gesturing to the red-bricked diner. She’d known Villanelle had been craving pancakes for the past week. Eve’s mother probably could have cooked some for them, but really, visiting her in the first place had been dangerous. The less time they spent with people they cared about, the better. “Surprise.”

“How did you know?” Villanelle had looked at Eve with such wide-eyed wonder, like she thought Eve had read her mind. Like they were twin souls, telepathically linked. Really, Eve should have just kept her mouth shut, pretended they were, just shrugged mysteriously and said, “I have my ways.” Was she really going to ruin it? Yeah. Eve was going to ruin it.

“I saw your search history on your laptop. It wasn’t hard to guess.” Villanelle had clicked on no less than fifty pancake-related links in the past two days alone. The girl had it bad.

“You invaded my privacy? That’s so romantic.” She pulled Eve in for a long, deep kiss, partly to show her appreciation, but Eve knew it was mostly to scandalize the diners whose seats by the window gave them a clear view of the car.

Eve had done the normal, reasonable thing and ordered a short stack, and so she sits now with a plate of three pancakes in front of her. Her companion, on the other hand, in a stunning impersonation of an overgrown child, has a tower of twelve _—“It’s symbolic, Eve”—_ pancakes in front of her, drenched in syrup and topped with a disproportionately tiny pat of butter. The assortment of other plates scattered on their table hold bacon, hash browns, onion rings, various fruits, and eggs over easy (for Villanelle) and scrambled (for Eve). One onion ring dangles from Villanelle’s ear, because, “ _Onion ring earrings, ha!”_ but also, “ _Don’t waste those! They’re delicious,”_ so they’d compromised on half of a matching set. Villanelle’s glass of orange juice is yet untouched, but Eve has already drained one of her two mugs of coffee. She’s considering asking for a third.

“What is Thanatos,” Villanelle says around a mouthful of pancake.

“What?”

Villanelle tilts her head to the TV on the far wall behind Eve. Eve turns just in time to catch the rest of the clue:

_“—this eight-letter figure is the personification of death.”_

“What is Thanos?” the contestant answers immediately with the utmost confidence, but the noise of derision Villanelle makes behind her and the telltale buzz that follows brings her total down 800 dollars. There’s another brief silence as the other two contestants get the opportunity to steal the answer, but it passes quietly, and ends with another buzz. The question goes unclaimed, having stumped all three contestants.

“What is Tha _nat_ os,” Alex Trebek corrects. Eve turns back to Villanelle, who looks absolutely pleased with herself.

“Why am I not surprised that you’re the expert in the death and murder category?”

“Please,” Villanelle huffs. “I would have been better than Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer combined if I hadn’t become an assassin.”

“I thought you would have been an interior designer.”

“I’ve...reconsidered. Translator, maybe? Or something very academic.”

“Polyglot and trivia buff. The total package.”

“But some other stuff, too—side hustle. Translators don’t make enough money.” Villanelle stabs another hunk out of her plate meant to serve four. “Do you remember what you said that night, after we had our little moment on the bridge?”

“I said a lot of things.”

“And moaned, begged, pleaded, various other synonyms,” Villanelle reminds her, unnecessarily—as if Eve would ever forget— but she waves her hand, impatient. “I mean after. You said you would have ‘hunted me down to the corners of the earth’, if I hadn’t turned around, which, wow, obsessive much.”

“I did.” Eve isn’t sure where she’s going. It sounds too long for there to be a punchline. Villanelle likes to make her jokes quickly, like a shot to the back. Ha.

“What else did you say?” Villanelle prompts.

“...I said I think we would have found each other in any other lifetime? ...And then you cried.”

“Eve. You called us _soulmates_. Of course I got emotional.” Villanelle wipes an invisible tear from her cheek, then gestures behind Eve. “There. Another lifetime.”

It takes a moment for Eve to register that Villanelle is talking about the rerun of the long-running cornerstone of American television playing right behind her.

“Jeopardy?”

“You fall in love with my brain and funny jokes. Same story, different setting. It’s perfect.”

Eve drums her fingers on the table, entertaining the idea. “...And instead of contract killing, you just kill it on game shows instead.”

“Exactly!”

“And I’m a desk jockey who lives a stale, routine life, but your boundless knowledge of useless trivia brings excitement to my world.”

Villanelle shakes her head.

“No. That’s boring,” She rejects immediately, as if she already has a clear picture of this alternate lifetime—as if she’s been sitting on this for a while. Eve has the sneaking suspicion she has. She’s always wondered where Villanelle’s mind goes when her body is still, like when she’s on a plane, a car, or the train from Aberdeen to London. Eight hours of being alone with her thoughts. Where does her mind go in those long stretches of time? One of the answers being “alternate universes” doesn’t surprise Eve in the least.

“Fellow competitor? Game show rivals who fall in love?”

“Nope.”

“You’re undercover because your target works on the show.”

Villanelle levels her with a dead look. “Why would an assassin expose her face on national television when she can just disguise herself as a hairstylist and then slit his throat?”

“Because you have a flair for the dramatic?”

“Okay,” Villanelle concedes. “I will give you that. But no. My hands are clean.”

“ _I’m_ the murderer?” Eve just barely fends off the chunk of honeydew that’s thrown at her. “What the hell?”

“What is with you and murder? Not everything is about murder. You and me, we don’t kill in this universe.”

“Then I’m out of guesses.”

Villanelle rolls her eyes, like the answer is the most obvious thing in the world. “Producer on the show. It’s love at first sight. Also, you wear glasses.”

“I’m pretty sure a producer dating a contestant would raise a lot of questions.”

“And therein lies the central conflict of our great love story,” Villanelle agrees solemnly, affecting her best BBC news presenter voice. “But then again, since when has Eve ever played by the rules of her profession?” She mimes playing an organ, imitating the ominous sounds of the instrument with her mouth. It’s actually pretty impressive.

She slices her way through her pancakes, shoves another forkful into her mouth, but she’s barely made a dent in the tower. She smiles at Eve, or tries to. With her mouth full, she looks like a chipmunk. If they weren’t in the habit of continuously switching burner phones, Eve would take a picture.

Well, if Villanelle is going to take a while to finish her absurd amount of food, they might as well have fun with it. Eve leans back against the smooth vinyl of the diner bench and makes herself comfortable.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Tell me our quiz show love story.”

//

Eve has seen her fair share of contestants, both from during her time working on the show and on the years before as a viewer. She’s seen the small-town heroes and the names that received top billing in that year’s blockbusters. She’s seen the Nobel laureates, the standup comedians, and everyone in between.

But her? She takes the cake.

“ _Oh my god, are you telling this story from my perspective?”_

_“Uh, yeah? Classic literary strategy. It’s always better from the point of view of the one in denial."_

The first time they met, Eve hadn’t known it was her. Eve had gone to the bathroom to fix her hair—

_“Do we meet in a bathroom in every universe?”_

_“Please shut up or we will never finish this story. And duh, of course.”_

—and noticed the person standing at the other sink had been staring at her resolutely. The woman was in blue scrubs, white shoes, and her hair was neat, pulled back from her face in a low bun. What a nurse was doing on set, Eve wasn’t sure, but she also had five minutes before go time, so she wasn’t going to ask questions.

“Are you alright?” Eve asked, but the woman gave her no response as she moved to leave. Weird. But when Eve turned back to herself in the mirror to fix her hair, she heard the voice behind her, in an accent that sounded like one of those BBC presenters, say, “Wear it down.” A British nurse in Culver City on the studio set of Jeopardy? Really weird. Eve thought about it for a moment, and followed the stranger’s advice. Why not?

When Eve left, she noticed an item on the floor. She picked it up, turned it over, and found the same woman’s face looking back at her on a Halloween costume-grade imitation of an access badge for Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. It said her name was Julie Smith. Eve pocketed it, concerned, but more than that, intrigued. Why was someone on set pretending to be a nurse? Trivia shows were not exactly prime targets for crime.

That same “nurse” was standing at the rightmost lectern when Eve got on stage. Her name on the front of the lectern, written in a looping, cheerful script that made Eve’s brows rise, confirmed her name was Julie. Maybe it was going to be an exciting day on set, for once.

She spots Elena, already sitting behind her camera. Eve should probably say something, like, _Hey, someone pretending to be a nurse has infiltrated the set of our show_ . _What if she’s here to kill someone?_ Or she could see how things play out. If the woman had gotten this far, she deserved to at least play the game.

“They didn’t have time to get her through costume and makeup?” Eve asked Elena, gesturing towards the nurse. “Looks like she just barely got here from her shift.”

“Guess not. Good thing she’s naturally cute, right? The camera loves her. Here, look.” Eve leaned over to look at Elena’s camera.

“Jesus, she’s photogenic.”

Elena pressed a button on the side of her headset and said, “Cameras rolling in five, four, three, two, one—“

And on cue came Bill’s voice.

“This is Jeopardy!” he announced. Bill introduced ineffably cool Carolyn Martens—

_“Why is a British woman hosting an American game show?”_

_“Eve, please! Suspension of disbelief. But if you must know, it’s because everyone knows British hosts are funnier than the American ones.”_

_—_ whose name was synonymous with that of the show, forever intertwined, and Carolyn introduced the contestants. The returning champion was a system administrator for a tech startup in Silicon Valley. The next contestant was an architect from Chicago. The nurse, Julie, introduced herself as a recent expat from London. She worked as an RA at a hospital in nearby Santa Clarita, lived with her uncle and cousin, and she hoped to simply do her little bit of good in the world. She was cute, she was sweet, she was mild-mannered, and to Eve, minus their odd encounter in the bathroom and the fake badge, she was a little too cookie cutter.

And then she wiped the floor with the other contestants.

The first round had been standard fare, the kind that gets lost in the sea of the show’s 8000 episode history. Julie had answered every question earnestly and pulled a good-humored face at the few times she was wrong. She ended the round in the lead, a decent $2000 ahead of the current reigning champion.

(They stopped for commercial break, allowing the contestants to stretch their legs and hydrate. Eve watched Julie disappear and come back at the last second, just before taping resumed. Where had she gone off to?)

But the second round? It was carnage. She’d ravaged the board, left the two other contestants gasping for air in the few gaps they were able to get words in edgewise. Julie may as well have slit their throats in front of the camera and announced it a suicide. If Carolyn was impressed, she didn’t show it, save for a fractional raise of her eyebrows when Julie consecutively harvested all six of the $2000 questions to open the round.

By the time the Final Jeopardy question came, Julie had dominated the Jeopardy! and Double Jeopardy! rounds. She had clearly run away with the win.

“Clams, mussels, oysters, and scallops, oh my! This potent poison causes tingling of the mouth, face, arms and legs, overall numbness, and what is commonly known as shellfish poisoning,” Carolyn read. The three contestants were an architect, a system administrator, and a nurse, and yet, as a final confirmation that whatever higher powers above had blessed Julie with brains and looks had also blessed her with luck, the Final Jeopardy question was, of course, about toxins. The game had been put on a silver platter and handed to the nurse in the sky blue scrubs.

Julie could have elected to not answer and still have come out $30000 ahead even if the next contestant had bet everything he had. But she didn’t. She didn’t play it safe. She didn’t do the polite thing. She’d taken the handbook of basic courtesy and good sportsmanship, set it on fire, and sprinkled its ashes on her competitors’ graves.

 _What is saxitoxin? $42000_ was her response, little hearts dotting the i’s. Jesus Christ. What a monster. 

Julie wagered everything she had, and, of course, answered correctly. 

She’d smiled sweetly, as sweet as a shark can look when it bares its teeth at the smell of blood in the water, and told Carolyn she looked forward to coming back in the next episode to “hopefully keep the momentum going!” Eve was doubtful.

When the cameras stopped rolling, the other contestants looked like they had just been eaten alive, because, well, they had. Even the consolation prizes of $2000 and $1000 weren't enough to salvage their dignities. 

Eve watched as Julie, the other contestants, and the chattering, excited audience filtered out, leaving the crew to pack up. Another successful day of filming. Would security discover a body, missing a pulse, slumped over in a bathroom stall, in a few hours? Or—

_“I thought you said there was no murder in this.”_

_“Is there? I don’t know. What I do know is we will never find out if you keep interrupting.”_

—would it be displayed in a public area, just begging to be found, throat slit in an obvious, attention-seeking display of carnage? Is that why it was like a switch had flipped in Julie in the Double Jeopardy round? Did she kill someone during the break, and then, fueled by the excitement of getting caught, pull off one of the highest single-game totals in the show’s history? Eve hoped it was Frank. The dickswab deserved it.

Eve felt someone grab her arm, jolting her from her reverie. 

“What the fuck was that?” Elena asked. She looked as amazed as Eve felt, though for different reasons. “That was brilliant.”

“You think she just got lucky?”

“God, I hope not.” She lowered her voice. “I love this job as much as anyone, but it’s like banging someone who only knows missionary. Perfectly serviceable, but sometimes you just want to open up the Kama Sutra.”

“And I don’t suppose today was like reverse cowgirl, hm?” said Bill, joining their lovely conversation. Bill Pargave: the man behind Jeopardy’s famous disembodied announcer voice, as intrinsically linked with the show as Carolyn herself, husband to a loving wife and cute baby daughter, and the man who’d kindly let Eve crash on his couch last month.

“Exactly! I can already imagine the tweets.”

Episodes were taped six to eight weeks before they aired, and it had become a game among the crew to guess how audiences would react to some of the more eccentric contestants. Elena, in particular, was a little more involved: she ran a not-so-secret Carolyn Martens stan account. The official reason for it was so that the crew could keep their finger on the pulse of their hardcore audience, for fun. Off the record? Elena had the biggest crush on Carolyn. Honestly, Eve couldn’t tell if it was strictly professional or a MILF thing. She didn’t dare to ask. 

Speaking of Kenny’s mom, Eve had to go find him. 

“Are you heading out, too, Eve?” Bill asked.

“You guys go ahead. I have something to take care of.”

Kenny was still sitting at his spot at the judges’ table. As the responsible, dutiful head of the Clue Crew, he was always the last to leave, staying behind to wrap things up for the day. Eve got straight to the point.

“Kenny, hey. Is our show rigged?” 

He looked absolutely offended. He had every right to be. Eve may as well have asked a fundamentalist Christian if God was real. 

“What? No. Never has, never will be.”

“So you’re telling me some random nurse came all the way from England and beats Roger Craig’s single game earnings record with a question that coincidentally fell under the knowledge necessary for her profession?”

“Well, when you put it like that, it does seem a bit suspicious? But no, me, Hugo, and Bear hand-pick all the categories and questions without special input. She was just lucky today, I guess. It happens.” Eve believed him, but she wasn’t convinced. He shifted his weight on his feet. “Do you, um, know if Elena has dinner plans tonight?”

“No idea, but you better go now if you want to catch her.”

“Alright. See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.” 

Eve waited until he disappeared around the corner before pulling out the badge from her pocket. Wide-set, inaccessible eyes looked at her. Eve looked back.

“Who are you?”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @she_rough on twitter if you'd like to chat about Killing Eve!
> 
> if you'd like to suggest jeopardy clues youd like featured in future chapters, um, yes please, i'm in need


End file.
